A couple of years ago, a professor at my university had a very interesting thought exchange with the class I was in. We were a small group, and I knew most of them, they were my friends. Anyway, we had a talk about language purism - not an unimportant subject if you study English in The Netherlands.

If Psystar sold their machines at higher prices than Apple sells Macs, would Apple still sue them?

They'd have no reason to, right? Since people can't possibly care for anything other than price, right? They don't care what they buy, they just go for the cheapest alternative, right? Right?

Thom, seriously, are you really this blind? (I considered "stupid" but you're not stupid. If anything, it takes real cunning to come up with this line of argument.)

Are you seriously suggesting that price is the ultimate factor here? Apple is the company that came on a market suffocated by Windows and cheap PC-clones and basically said "this is our stuff, we think it's so good we're gonna sell it at these outrageous prices." Does that seem like a company who lacks confidence? A company that cares about scraping the bottom of the barrel or about bottom-feeders?

What about their customers, all those people who bought and keep buying their expensive stuff, are they all posers and cretins? These are people who vote with their money, and quite a lot of them. Are they all middle-aged retards, the kind that buys a Ferrari to make up for a small penis? Is that what OSNews is saying, through you, to anybody who's ever bought anything from Apple? You insecure retard? Really?

What if Apple's stuff is not complete shite, they don't lack confidence, and their customers are not all morons. What a notion. Could it then be perhaps that they have something of value, and that's what they're trying to protect by going against Psystar? Because Psystar is just the beginning. If Psystar got away with it a lot more would come.

Thom, this "article" is nothing but pure trolling. You've exhausted your "arguments", you've had them torn to pieces by commentators in every other thread you've started on this subject. Yet you won't stop, and now that you've run out of arguments you pull stuff like this? Seriously, when's it gonna stop? This is not what OSNews is about.

I'm begging the other editors and whoever owns this site to do something. I came to OSNews back when it was news about operating systems and related topics. How is it that a completely unsubstantiated and insulting piece of writing like this came to be representative for OSNews?

Laugh it up. More people, _especially_ geeks are buying Macs as they get fed up waiting for the second coming of Microsoft. Apple might be flawed, but eventually you just want to grow up and get some work done and begin to see your computer as just a tool and not a penis extension with which to score points with in Internet debates. Honestly, Mac vs. PC flame wars are about as mature as 13 year olds on Halo.

I wonder if you live in the US.
Because if you lived in Europe and realized that most Macs (take for instance a Macbook Pro or a latest generation Mac Pro) cost twice the price of a PC with similar specs, you'd probably think twice before writing that price is not all that important.
I feel especially bad when I see that simple upgrades are either not available at all (especially graphics cards) or cost more than twice as much as you would expect.
It is difficult to convince Europeans that a double price for something which on paper looks the same, can be granted by quality alone.

Actually, between your ad hominem attacks, you are actually making Thom's point. You are saying that the people who pay more for Macs are not stupid, they are doing it because it is a superior product. Based on that, how would Psystar selling Mac OS to the unwashed masses who currently buy cheapo PC's hurt you? You guys can keep on buying your expensive, superior Macs. Apple would still get your money. The only thing new is that they would also get money from those who currently by cheap PC's.

How would you guys be hurt by increased Mac OS sales to the cheap PC crowd? Apple makes more money. You guys can keep buying your Cadillac PC's.

You are saying that the people who pay more for Macs are not stupid, they are doing it because it is a superior product. Based on that, how would Psystar selling Mac OS to the unwashed masses who currently buy cheapo PC's hurt you?

First of all, don't assume I own a Mac, because I don't. I only own iPods. But that's somewhat irrelevant.

So let me rephrase your question. How does a cheap Mac clone hurt Apple customers? First of all, if left unchecked, it would seriously undermine Apple's bussiness model. If Psystar was left alone more cloners would follow. History has shown us that Apple can be buried by cloners since it almost happened before. I suspect that whoever is behind Psystar intends exactly that.

No, it's not a conspiracy theory. If you have any notion that Psystar is a small honest company out to make a small and honest buck, think again. Small honest companies don't engage in multi-million dollar lawsuits against the computer manufacturer with the deepest pockets around and one of the meanest legal teams. There's serious money and serious legal counsel behind Psystar (which also translates to money). And for what? Spend all this money just to gain Psystar the right to sell cheap computers? Does that make any sense? Engage in an uphill legal battle and spend tons of money for the right to enter a business with very thin returns? Wow, Psystar must be downright philantropists.

Returning to the topic: if Apple is hurt they can't keep on making the products that their customers enjoy. In fact, they'll probably stop making, or at least crippling, OS X itself, which everybody seems to be after. How does that make sense? No matter the outcome, the masses will NOT get OS X. Assuming that Apple is, for the sake of argument, forced to let anybody bundle OS X, they will cripple it, change the license, add serious protection methods and so on. OS X as we know and like it would be gone.

Secondly, there's a bigger issue here. Psystar is attacking a way of doing business that's not just Apple's, it's widely used in the IT industry today: renting software instead of selling it (not to mention SaaS). That model is based on current copyright law. A favorable decision for Psystar would have so far-reaching consequences that some legal experts say it might affect even FOSS licenses, and it would definitely impact lots of commercial software.

Thirdly, there's the principle of the thing. I have to admit when somebody is in the right or the wrong, no matter how I personally feel about them. There's rules and laws and if we're ready to give them up whenever we feel like it we might as well grab clubs and return to the caves. Psystar is wrong and breaking the law.

Oh, I see. So then, if I bought a Mac because it was the most accessible computer for a blind person like me, that means that I'm automatically a snob, eh? You might want to take a long look in the mirror before you start pointing the finger there.

While Apple may, indeed, have something good to offer, it is really in their support services and the OS X itself. Apple knows that little more than a fancy case is all that stands behind their claims of "higher quality" as machines.

I can build a top-end system for $800, pay $50 for Psystar's EFI fix, $200 on the best case I could find, and $170 for MacOS X. Apple would charge me a good $3000 for the same specs. Seems like not much of a reason to buy to me... unless you are the type that calls their tech support frequently.

I have even less reason to want to buy an over-priced Mac when I consider all of the mods I could do to my Volvo to eek out another few miles per second :-) Or how many steak dinners I could buy...

Not to mention I get 3 year warranties on most of my parts anyway, those things that don't have a 3 year warranty are so cheap to replace it wouldn't be worth the shipping costs anyway!

To the masses, whom are concerned with cash, most Apple products are not desirable. However, a cheap alternative could be. The masses are well aware that they are not buying an Apple.

Should the masses have a bad experience with the low-end knock-offs, they will then consider Apple-direct as the best possible option and will inform others around them to buy direct.

The problem is that, to the masses, Apple has nothing unique to offer in computing experience outside of the software department. And that software, IMHO, sucks pretty hard.

I don't like Windows, but I'll run it as my primary OS long before MacOS X.